Vortex Mod Safety

Know if your mods are still safe — before you deploy them.

Files get removed from Nexus Mods for a reason — sometimes a routine cleanup, sometimes a moderation takedown. But the copy sitting in your staging folder doesn't know that. A mod you downloaded months ago could have been pulled from the site yesterday, and nothing in your setup would ever tell you.

Mod Safety asks the site. Every mod you have installed is checked against its current status on nexusmods.com, and anything that has been removed gets flagged — before it's deployed into your game.

What you get

• []A scan on every launch — when Vortex starts, your whole mod list is checked (about a second, even for 100+ mods) and you're told the result either way: a green "all clear", or a warning listing exactly what was flagged and why.[/]

  []A Safety column on your mod list — Clean / FLAGGED / Caution / Unknown for every mod, sortable and groupable, with the detailed reason in the mod's info panel.[/]

  []Install-time warnings — install a mod whose file was removed from the site and you get an immediate alert, with one-click Disable.[/]

  []A "Check Mod Safety" toolbar button — scan on demand and get a full summary dialog.[/]

  []Health check integration — registered with Vortex's health check system, so it also re-runs automatically after installs and game switches.[/]

  The verdicts

  • []Clean — the file and its mod page are available on the site.[/]

    []FLAGGED — the file was deleted on Nexus Mods, the mod was removed by moderation, or the mod no longer exists at all. Treat with suspicion.[/]

    []Caution — the mod is currently under review by Nexus Mods moderation. No verdict yet; proceed with care.[/]

    []Unknown — not a Nexus download and its hash isn't known to the site. Nothing to check against.[/]

    A failed lookup (no internet, site down) is always shown as a failure — never disguised as "safe".

    Privacy & how it works

    Mods are identified by the game/mod/file IDs Vortex already knows, with the archive's MD5 (which Vortex already stores) as fallback for manually added files. Lookups are a couple of batched requests to the nexusmods.com public GraphQL API. Nothing is uploaded, no file contents are read, no API key is required, and identifiers only ever travel in request bodies — never in URLs.

    Requirements

    Vortex 2. 3. 0-beta. 1 or newer (uses the health check API introduced there; tested through 2. 4. 0-beta. 1).

    Honest limitations

    The site doesn't record who deleted a file. A moderation takedown and an author tidying up old versions look identical, so a FLAGGED old file can also mean routine author cleanup — when in doubt, check the mod page. Hidden or unpublished mods are deliberately not flagged.

    Source

    Open source (GPL-3): github.com/Jrollsons/vortex-mod-safety — issues and PRs welcome.